Sunday

My brain is very much influenced by what I first read in the morning. Today I read funny tweets, and I'm thinking in quips.

Mudita is an interesting challenge, because I need to think about my joys and have a kind of objective sympathy for my joys and virtues, and I'm like, that always makes me kind of cry because nobody says good things about me unless I ask them too while I'm reading a self help book that suggests you do that, or the random hit and run by people that are inexplicable.

I like sending friendliness out into the universe, compassion, joy for others joy, but mental stability and balancing ability isn't something, that is more of a hard skill, and I'm not even sure everyone aspires to it. I do wish the deep absorption of meditative states of depth to people, but I know not everyone aspires to that. There are sort of precursors to that, you don't need to meditate deeply, but now I'm thinking too much and it's not a simple quality to send out there. Perhaps general mindfulness which will have a quality of equanimity to it because it's so mindful. There is an aspect of equanimity in simple mindfulness.

Upeksha, equanimity about myself, tempts me to saying, you're exaggerating, it's not that bad, come on, you're doing you best--but my feelings are important and if I'm exaggerating it's because I'm not a robot and I'm feeling my life choices and their consequences, and they inform me about the world after the fact, a bit too late, in other words. It's like speed chess, you have to make moves, and oh well, you lost again. Speed chess is good for becoming more instinctual and less contemplative for the think about it for 3 days type like myself. Meanwhile I've made crazy instinctual moves that nobody would ever make in the light of day. I'm a depressive type, I don't have anxiety about choices, I'm just sad about some in the past.

To make it more simple, beaming upeksha out into the universe is OK. I try and somehow be beyond conditions, and balance my compassion and joy, and send it from deep meditative states, which isn't easy because you have to get into those deep meditative states, and I struggle with restlessness these days, impulsivity for sense desire.

My son was joking with me about eating cats and dogs, joking on Trump's harmful lies, and I'm not ready to joke about the harm he commits. I do think finding the humor in things is a kind of equanimity move. 

That also makes me think of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, some people can't joke about things because everything is tinged with harm and wrong, the project of trying to get less of that is everything. 

Do women have an easier path to enlightenment? From the Therigatha:

your passion for sex shriveled away

like a herb dried up in a pot.

Jan Westerhoff is the scholar of Nagarjuna. He has a talk about how rebirth operates in Nagarjuna.